Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

Phlegrean Fields is waking up. Scientists are trying to predict what it will do next, and what its unrest means for volcanoes worldwide

Barbie Latza NadeauOctober 12, 2017Will Italy's Ominous Supervolcano Erupt Soon?Solfatara volcanic crater near Naples. Credit: J-Wildman Getty ImagesPOZZUOLLI, Italy—Tragedy struck at the Solfatara volcano crater north of Naples a few weeks ago. An 11-year-old boy climbed over a low, wooden fence, ventured onto the chalky moonscape, and fell into an open fissure. His parents frantically tried to pull him out, just as the hollow floor of the crater crumbled, sending them all to their deaths in a gaseous pit of boiling gray mud, as the family’s seven-year-old boy watched in horror. The accident was a freak occurrence, responsible for the only recorded deaths on this crater in centuries. But those hot gases hold an ominous story: Solfatara is part of the massive Phlegrean Fields, a threatening supervolcano experts agree could begin erupting anytime.

Phlegrean Fields—a network of two dozen craters and other volcanic structures—is especially worrisome because the nested craters stretch under the Gulf of Naples, right alongside the greater Naples metropolitan area, home to more than three million people. Much like Yellowstone in Wyoming and Long Valley in California, Phlegrean Fields is classified as a supervolcano that, when (not if) it next erupts, could cause a catastrophic global event. Its eruption 200,000 years ago—the largest ever in what is now Europe—darkened skies worldwide, causing a terrible volcanic winter. An eruption 40,000 years ago may have wiped out Neanderthals, according to a 2010 report that is hotly debated. Phlegrean Fields last blew in 1538, an eight-day eruption that created the 440-foot Monte Nuovo volcano on the coast.

Even if Phlegrean Fields takes another 500 years to erupt, it offers a unique research opportunity because of its particular style of unrest. Prior to and after the 1538 eruption the ground in this highly populated area experienced very slow, vertical oscillations known as bradyseism, which do not exist to the same extent in any other caldera in the world. In the 1970s these movements became strong again—the ground rose and fell 10 to 15 centimeters (about four to six inches) a year. Volcanologists were concerned the complex might be reaching another eruptive phase. The fear became worse after bradyseism caused the ground to lift an incredible 110 centimeters (43.3 inches) in 1982, and the movements then stopped almost entirely in 1983. But Phlegrean Fields did not erupt.

In 2016 the volcano was upgraded from green to yellow on a scale that continues up to orange and then red, which indicates an imminent eruption. Scientists last declared it “red” in 1983 after roads, houses and a hospital were destroyed by the sudden 110-centimeter rise. More than 30,000 people had to be evacuated. Whether or not the odd, current silence means a threat is imminent is open to scientific interpretation, just as changes at other volcanoes worldwide are. The latest studies provide some intriguing suggestions, and offer insights about possible eruptions elsewhere on Earth.

Part of determining just when Solfatara or another portion of Phlegrean Fields might erupt is understanding what is under the crust. That has been difficult to ascertain with certainty because most of the crater is covered by a one- to two-kilometer-thick caprock. Several recent studies paint different pictures of just what lies below this protective lid. Luca De Siena, an expert in geophysics and volcanology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, thinks there are reservoirs of static, thick magma about a kilometer long and five to 10 meters thick that last migrated between ancient cavities around the 1980s. Tiziana Vanorio, director of Stanford University’s Rock Physics Laboratory, instead thinks the caldera’s cavities have less structure and hold hot, fluid liquids and gases that influence the stress and strain on the caprock.

Both of the Italian experts grew up on the Phlegrean Fields caldera and are happy to credit each other’s research, even as they disagree with it. If the next eruption is explosive like in the past, rather than effusive (which would be relatively gentler), Vanorio, who was evacuated after the 1982 unrest, says what is under the caprock really will not matter for people in cities such as nearby Pozzuoli. “Whether the eruption involves viscous magma containing sufficient gas dissolved under pressure or hot mudflows and ash-laden gas clouds, the town of Pozzuoli and its surroundings would not be subjected to such different risk exposures,” she says. In other words, events resulting from conditions predicted by either hypothesis would be equally catastrophic.

Phlegrean Fields offers an intriguing research opportunity because companies drilled almost a dozen geothermal wells there prior to the 1982 fright. No longer used, the wells now allow extensive monitoring, provide direct data about underground characteristics such as temperature and allow researchers to drill cores into the deep interior. “Having cores is like having a view through a window to a landscape that has been long-covered,” Vanorio says. Techniques used in Phlegrean Fields are already being applied at other major volcanoes, including Mount Saint Helens in the U.S., Deception Island in Antarctica, Mount Teide in the Canary Islands and Mount Aso in Japan.

And yet, the debate about what exactly is under the caprock of this supervolcano stems from lack of access beyond the geothermal wells. In 2010 funding was made available for a deep-drill project that would have penetrated all the way through the caprock to see what was below. But the Neapolitan mayor, backed by a handful of experts, stopped the plan based on fears that drilling might cause an eruption. By the time a new city administration green-lighted drilling again several years later, the funds had been sent elsewhere. Some researchers are trying to revive the project.

Unfazed, De Siena and a group of experts published a study in August that explores the dramatic unrest in the 1980s and sets out new methods to measure and analyze even the subtlest movements and sounds. He hopes that new techniques will take some of the guesswork out of modeling eruptions. One approach would be to monitor underground water, underground rocks, and oil and gas fields together, providing unified data that go beyond studying such factors independently.

All of this could make it safer for populations that live on volcanoes around the world. “Unlike earthquake prediction, scientists can actually do something about volcanoes,” Vanorio says. “Though each volcano is unique and may change its eruptive behavior at any time, there are trends in precursors. That helps scientists get better at predicting eruptions.”

Despite new tools and renewed enthusiasm for useful results, scientists still cannot say how soon Phlegrean Fields might erupt. “Are we in danger?” De Siena asks. “The answer is always yes. There are more than three million people there. Any eruption of any sort is going to be dangerous.”

Follow a team of volcano sleuths as they embark on a worldwide hunt for an elusive volcanic mega-eruption that plunged medieval Earth into a deep freeze. The mystery begins when archaeologists find a hastily dug mass grave of 4,000 men, women, and children in London. At first they assume it’s a plague pit from the Black Death, but when they date the bones, they turn out to be too old by a century. So what killed off these families? The chronicles of that time describe a run of wild weather that devastated crops and spread famine across Europe. NOVA’s expert team looks for the signature of a volcanic eruption big enough to have blasted a huge cloud of ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, which chilled the entire planet. From Greenland to Antarctica, the team finds telltale “fingerprints” in ice and soil layers until, finally, they narrow down the culprit to a smoldering crater on a remote Indonesian island. Nearly 750 years ago, this volcano’s colossal explosion shot a million tons of rock and ash every second into the atmosphere. Across the globe, it turned summer into winter. What would happen if another such cataclysm struck again today?

volcanoA small eruption of Mount Rinjani, with volcanic lightning. Location: Lombok, Indonesia. Credit: Oliver Spalt, Wikipedia.A new geological record of the Yellowstone supervolcano's last catastrophic eruption is rewriting the story of what happened 630,000 years ago and how it affected Earth's climate. This eruption formed the vast Yellowstone caldera observed today, the second largest on Earth.

Two layers of volcanic ash bearing the unique chemical fingerprint of Yellowstone's most recent super-eruption have been found in seafloor sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of Southern California. These layers of ash, or tephra, are sandwiched among sediments that contain a remarkably detailed record of ocean and climate change. Together, both the ash and sediments reveal that the last eruption was not a single event, but two closely spaced eruptions that tapped the brakes on a natural global-warming trend that eventually led the planet out of a major ice age.

"We discovered here that there are two ash-forming super-eruptions 170 years apart and each cooled the ocean by about 3 degrees Celsius," said U.C. Santa Barbara geologist Jim Kennett, who will be presenting a poster about the work on Wednesday, 25 Oct., at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle. Attaining the resolution to detect the separate eruptions and their climate effects is due to several special conditions found in the Santa Barbara Basin, Kennett said.

One condition is the steady supply of sediment to the basin from land—about one millimeter per year. Then there is the highly productive ocean in the area, fed by upwelling nutrients from the deep ocean. This produced abundant tiny shells of foraminifera that sank to the seafloor where they were buried and preserved in the sediment. These shells contain temperature-dependent oxygen isotopes that reveal the sea surface temperatures in which they lived.

But none of this would be much use, said Kennett, if it not for the fact that oxygen levels at the seafloor in the basin are so low as to preclude burrowing marine animals that mix the sediments and degrade details of the climate record. As a result, Kennett and his colleagues can resolve the climate with decadal resolution.

By comparing the volcanic ash record with the foraminifera climate record, it's quite clear, he said, that both of these eruptions caused separate volcanic winters—which is when ash and volcanic sulfur dioxide emissions reduce that amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface and cause temporary cooling. These cooling events occurred at an especially sensitive time when the global climate was warming out of an ice age and easily disrupted by such events.

Kennett and colleagues discovered that the onset of the global cooling events was abrupt and coincided precisely with the timing of the supervolcanic eruptions, the first such observation of its kind.

But each time, the cooling lasted longer than it should have, according to simple climate models, he said. "We see planetary cooling of sufficient magnitude and duration that there had to be other feedbacks involved." These feedbacks might include increased sunlight-reflecting sea ice and snow cover or a change in ocean circulation that would cool the planet for a longer time.

"It was a fickle, but fortunate time," Kennett said of the timing of the eruptions. "If these eruptions had happened during another climate state we may not have detected the climatic consequences because the cooling episodes would not have lasted so long."

Explore further: Researchers document one of planet's largest volcanic eruptions

As the rocky planet close to the sun ages and moves away from the sun, it increases in size and develops an expanded atmosphere. The gap identified is probably due to the tendency of orbits to rest/resonate at discrete distances, and there is a broad line of growth running from the bottom left corner to the top right.

I keep seeing those planets with deep atmospheres as "drogue chutes". The electrical charge built up in each reacts more with the electrical field powering the star, and I see them spread out across a solar system once they are ejected from the star.

It's all about spreading the electrical load on a solar system.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept that gas giants have large solid cores, as Thornhill mentions in his Space News video.

Earth may not provide the best blueprint for how rocky planets are born.

An analysis of planets outside the solar system suggests that most hot, rocky exoplanets started out more like gassy Neptunes. Such planets are rocky now because their stars blew their thick atmospheres away, leaving nothing but an inhospitable core, researchers report in a paper posted online October 15 at arXiv.org. That could mean these planets are not as representative of Earth as scientists thought, and using them to estimate the frequency of potentially life-hosting worlds is misleading.

“One of the big discoveries is that Earth-sized, likely rocky planets are incredibly common, at least on hotter orbits,” says planetary scientist Eric Lopez of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who wasn’t involved in the study. “The big question is, are those hot exoplanets telling us anything about the frequency of Earthlike planets? This suggests that they might not be.”

Observations so far suggest that worlds about Earth’s size probably cluster into two categories: rocky super-Earths and gaseous mini-Neptunes (SN Online: 6/19/17). Super-Earths are between one and 1.5 times as wide as Earth; mini-Neptunes are between 2.5 and four times Earth’s size. Earlier work showed that there’s a clear gap between these planet sizes.

Because planets that are close to their stars are easier for telescopes to see, most of the rocky super-Earths discovered so far have close-in orbits — with years lasting between about two to 100 Earth days — making the worlds way too hot to host life as we know it. But because they are rocky like Earth, scientists include these worlds with their cooler brethren when estimating how many habitable planets might be out there.

If hot super-Earths start out rocky, perhaps it is because the worlds form later than their puffy mini-Neptune companions, when there’s less gas left in the growing planetary system to build an atmosphere. Or, conversely, such planets, along with mini-Neptunes, may start with thick atmospheres. These rocky worlds may have had their atmospheres stripped away by stellar winds.

Story continues after diagram

Empty valley

A gap exists between the sizes of small, rocky planets (red) and slightly larger, gaseous planets (blue). The slope of the gap trends downward, with most of the largest rocky worlds nestling close to their stars, suggesting the planets started out with thick atmospheres that their stars blew away.

V. Van Eylen et al/arXiv.org 2017

Now, exoplanet astronomer Vincent Van Eylen of Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues have shown that the fault is in the stars. “You really have these two populations, and the influence of the star is what creates this separation,” Van Eylen says. That result could warn astronomers not to rely too heavily on these hot, rocky worlds when calculating how many habitable planets are likely to exist.

To measure the planets’ sizes, astronomers need to know the sizes of their stars. Van Eylen and colleagues analyzed 117 planets whose host stars’ sizes had been measured using astroseismology. This technique tracks how often the star’s brightness changes as interior oscillations ripple through it, and uses the frequency to determine its size.

“Think of the stars as musical instruments,” Van Eylen says. A double bass and a violin produce sound the same way, but the pitch is different because of the instrument’s size. “It’s exactly the same thing with stars.”

The researchers then calculated the planets’ sizes — between one and four times the Earth — with about four times greater precision than in previous studies. As expected, the planets clustered in groups of around 1.5 and 2.5 times Earth’s radius, leaving a gap in the middle.

Next the team looked at how the planets’ sizes changed with distance from the host star. Planets that were rocky from the start should be smaller close to the stars, where studies of other young star systems suggest there should have been less material available when these planets were forming. But if proximity to a star’s winds is key, there should be some larger rocky worlds closer in, with smaller gaseous worlds farther out.

Van Eylen’s planets matched the second picture: The largest of the rocky planets nestled close to the stars were bigger than the distant ones. That suggests the rocky planets once had atmospheres, and lost them.

“It’s not fair to take the close-in planets and assume that the more distant planets are just like them,” says exoplanet astronomer Courtney Dressing of the University of California, Berkeley. “You might be fooling yourself.”

If all the planets, and maybe some moons, in the solar system now were once big old suns like the one that is still left; where is all that inconceivably vast amount of mass that was "stripped off" to be found now ??

btw, the "third rock from the sun" is not a big rock, it just has a very, very, very thin rocky crust.Nobody knows for sure what is in the center 99% of the globe.Maybe it's like a big baked soufflé.

Most mass extinctions began with vast convulsions of Earth’s interior—can we detect that?

Howard Lee - 11/9/2017, 5:00 AM

Enlarge“The revolutions and changes which have left the earth as we now find it, are not confined to the overthrow of the ancient layers” - Georges Cuvier, 1831.

Our planet Earth has extinguished large portions of its inhabitants several times since the dawn of animals. And if science tells us anything, it will surely try to kill us all again. Working in the 19th century, paleontology pioneer Georges Cuvier saw dramatic turnovers of life in the fossil record and likened them to the French Revolution, then still fresh in his memory.

Today, we refer to such events as “mass extinctions,” incidents in which many species of animals and plants died out in a geological instant. They are so profound and have such global reach that geological time itself is sliced up into periods—Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous—that are often defined by these mass extinctions.

Debate over what caused these factory resets of life has raged ever since Cuvier’s time. He considered them to be caused by environmental catastrophes that rearranged the oceans and continents. Since then, a host of explanations have been proposed, including diseases, galactic gamma rays, dark matter, and even methane from microbes. But since the 1970s, most scientists have considered the likely root cause to be either asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, or a combination of both.

Those asteroid (or comet) impacts have captured the public imagination ever since 1980, when Luis and Walter Alvarez found global traces of iridium, which they inferred to be extraterrestrial, at the geological boundary that marked the disappearance of the dinosaurs. The identification of the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico soon after sealed the deal. Impacts have been proposed to explain other mass extinctions, but there’s very little actual evidence to support those links. In the words of researchers David Bond and Stephen Grasby, who reviewed the evidence in 2016: “Despite much searching, there remains only one confirmed example of a bolide impact coinciding with an extinction event.”

Not just a random series of unfortunate events

Volcanism, on the other hand, has coincided with most, if not all, mass extinctions—it looks suspiciously like a serial killer, if you like.

This isn’t your regular Vesuvius/St. Helens/Hawaii style volcanism. It’s not even super-volcanoes like Yellowstone or Tambora. I’m talking about something far, far bigger: a rare, epic volcanic phenomenon called a Large Igneous Province or “LIP.”

LIPs are floods of basalt lava on an unimaginable scale: the Siberian Traps LIP, which erupted at the end-Permian extinction, covers an area the size of Europe. It’s estimated that over 3 million cubic kilometers of rock were vomited onto the planet’s surface, The end-Triassic Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, stretching from Canada to Brazil into Europe and West Africa, was just as large. Others are similarly gigantic.

In the words of Bond and Grasby, “Four of the ‘Big Five’ extinctions are associated with LIPs—too many to be mere coincidence —implying that large-scale volcanism is the main driver of mass extinctions.”

Even the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous was simultaneous with the Deccan Traps LIP in India. It’s possible that the combination of the Chicxulub asteroid impact and the Deccan eruptions, rather than just the impact, pushed life over the edge. And recent evidence points to a LIP trigger for the second phase of the end-Ordovician extinction, the one missing from Bond and Grasby’s quote. If confirmed, that would link LIPs to all five of the Big Five extinctions.

A schematic illustration of a Large Igneous Province (LIP) in action (based on input from input from Anja Schmidt, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Marie Edmonds, and Henrik Svensen).Enlarge / A schematic illustration of a Large Igneous Province (LIP) in action (based on input from input from Anja Schmidt, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Marie Edmonds, and Henrik Svensen).H. LeeFor decades, the sheer size of LIPs and the wide error margins in attempts to put dates on rock formations led geologists to suspect that LIPs erupted slowly over millions of years; any associated extinctions could easily be just coincidence. But in the last four years, improved rock dating techniques have shrunk those error margins, revealing two important things: LIPs erupt in intense pulses that are geologically fast (tens of thousands of years), and they often coincide precisely with mass extinctions.

Seth Burgess, a geochronologist from the US Geological Survey, told me about his observations while dating part of the Karoo-Ferrar LIP in Antarctica:

“Every single rock I dated from the Ferrar—and we’re talking up the mountain, down in the ravine, from one side of the continent to the other along the Transantarctic Mountains—they’re all 182.6 million years old. It's every single rock the same. It gives me a great sense of it’s all in one shot. It’s not a big slow prolonged event.”

Burgess used the new dating techniques to show that the Siberian Traps LIP was also quick, and it happened at precisely the same time as the end-Permian mass extinction—Earth’s most severe. “We dated the first magmas to spread laterally into the shallow Siberian crust and think these magmas are the culprit,” he said. “This spread happened fast and at precisely the same time as the extinction.”

As someone told me years ago, there’s a lot of time in deep time. Yet the LIP and the extinction happen at exactly the same time, even though the gaps between these eruptions are millions or tens of millions of years. That seems enough to declare the LIP a smoking gun behind that extinction.

This is true for multiple LIP-extinction links. Precise matches have been confirmed for the mid-Cambrian, the end-Triassic, the Toarcian, and others. And it isn’t just a date match. Volcanic nickel and mercury have been found at several extinction-aged locations, including for the Ordovician and Cretaceous events.

So if our serial killer is the volcanism associated with an LIP eruption, when will it strike again?

To answer that, we need to find what causes the planet to hemorrhage lava on such a scale. And for that, we need to look deep into Earth’s mantle.

Chimneys of apocalypse

Seismologists like Barbara Romanowicz and Scott French of UC Berkeley do exactly that—look deep into the mantle. They use the vibrations from large earthquakes around the world to illuminate the inside of our planet and take pictures, rather like a medical ultrasound.

Their images reveal fat mantle plumes, regions of hot rock as wide as France, rising like chimneys through the mantle. Today, they fuel relatively benign hotspot volcanoes like Hawaii and Iceland—tourist attractions rather than global apocalypses. But evidence suggests that LIPs were also fed by mantle plumes. The plumes responsible for LIPs must have been something far more potent.

In their quest to understand what could switch these plumes into killers, seismologists and mineral physicists are searching for the driving force that produces mantle plumes. The Earth’s molten core supplies heat that drives the motion of mantle material, like a burner heats a pot of water, so it makes sense to focus on the roots of plumes at the core-mantle boundary. There, seismologists have discovered blister-like patches with properties that hint that molten metal might be leaking from the core.

Earthquake waves passing through those patches slow dramatically, giving them their name: “Ultra-Low Velocity Zones” or “ULVZs.” As a result, the seismic waves are bent, like light through thick glass. The patches seem to be confined to the roots of plumes and have been confirmed to reside beneath Iceland, Hawaii, and Samoa so far. Their seismic slowness suggests they might contain molten rock. While the mantle behaves a bit like a fluid, the pressures there ensure that rock stays solid until relatively shallow depths.

“What’s special about these ULVZs is they are also very fat!” Romanowicz told Ars. “They seem to be 800km in diameter at the core-mantle boundary—we can’t say very precisely. It’s still a mystery what they are. I think [it] is partial melting, but exactly what their role is, how long they have been there, this is something we need to investigate further.”

Catherine McCammon, of the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and Razvan Caracas, a mineral physicist from the University of Lyon, have been investigating the properties of ULVZs by looking at how rocks behave under the conditions that are thought to be present at the core-mantle boundary. “There are not too many people that do this type of experiment,” explained McCammon. “You need a synchrotron, so this makes it a rather exclusive group of people.”

The synchrotron that she is referring to is a particle accelerator three times the size of a football stadium, which generates X-rays 100 billion times brighter than those from a hospital X-ray machine. The X-rays are blasted through mineral samples compressed and heated to recreate conditions at the core-mantle boundary. Data from the X-rays track the vibrations of the materials’ atoms, which allows us to measure the seismic wave speed through those samples. Razvan, by contrast, uses quantum mechanics to calculate the theoretical seismic wave speed of those same materials. The difference between the theoretical and measured results suggests there’s molten material in ULVZs. “We think it’s some degree of melt,” said Catherine. “Either partial melt, or metallic iron melt that came from the core.”

Other scientists have seen hints of liquid moving in ULVZs, and a core-derived melt might explain why some diamonds contain microscopic traces of iron-nickel alloy—the material that makes up the core. If ULVZs are indeed patches where molten core leaks into the mantle, perhaps Earth’s core has a role in turning plumes into mass killers. But core leakage is not supported by hot-spot lava chemistry, and there is no clear evidence for any material from the core ever making it to Earth’s surface in a plume, so ULVZs remain an enigma for now.

Perhaps the ‘special sauce’ that turns plumes into killers is much closer to the Earth’s surface.

_... Where the Neutrons in Neutron Stars come from_... It is generally accepted that all fairly massive celestial objects (from stars, down through planets, to asteroids) were formed in various gravitational aggregation processes. It is not an unreasonable further leap to suggest that when such an aggregated body reaches a certain mass, gravitational pressures at its core will be sufficient to compress some of its matter to neutrons. This is the basis of the CONCORE model...._... The Concore Model of planet and star interiors _... Below we will see how the extremely slow decay on neutrons at the Cores of bodies appears responsible for Earth Expansion and many other features of celestial bodies._... How Neutron decay generates expansion and energy flow_... The core neutrons in the Concore model will be almost completely suppressed from decay by virtue of their position. But a tiny fraction of them, particularly those at the outer boundary of the Core, may decay into hydrogen atoms. In doing so, they will increase enormously in volume. It is this mechanism which appears responsible for Earth Expansion and its consequent after-effects._To put it into another perspective, it has been calculated that if all the mass of the Earth was in the form of the compressed neutrons making up a neutron star, the planet would be only 366 metres in diameter. The very slow decay of just a fraction of these compressed neutrons would be ample to swell up the planet to its present size.

OTHER RELATED MODELSMichael Mozina, a member of this forum, has had a theory that the Sun contains a neutron star core that provides its energy. Michael was working with Oliver Manuel on his Iron Sun model. And Charles Cagle had a theory since the late 90s that Earth has a neutron star core that caused periodic expansion of the Earth. Following is some info on Cagle's model.

Charles Cagle on Expanding Earth (from 3 online sources)

Breakthrough on How Continents Dividedhttps://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=18267&sid=0837289ba8bede187a93c8f46db00e0aLloyd » Tue Mar 03, 2009 7: 36 pm... Charles Cagle theorizes a constantly varying field, which he calls electromagnetotoroid, which changes from a toroid (doughnut shape) to a poloid (egg-shape, I think) and back. He says planetoids contain such fields, which produce neutronium during one of the two stages, which cause planetary expansion. The neutronium would decay rapidly into protons and electrons, which I suppose would mostly form Hydrogen atoms pretty quickly, and, since oxygen is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth, I suppose it would tend to form water, which is a constituent of much of Earth's rocks.

[David Noel at the new website above says regarding the Kola superdeep borehole, first quoting Wikipedia, "the rock at that depth {below 7 km} had been thoroughly fractured and was saturated with water, which was surprising. This water, unlike surface water, must have come from deep-crust minerals and had been unable to reach the surface because of a layer of impermeable rock. Another unexpected discovery was a large quantity of hydrogen gas. The mud that flowed out of the hole was described as 'boiling' with hydrogen". David commented that the Earth's core surface "was working on hydrogen, and water is the most stable oxide of hydrogen, taken up with whatever oxygen was available."]

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Magnetic field around young star capturedhttps://phys.org/news/2014-10-magnetic-field-young-star-captured.htmlOctober 27, 2014ccryder1947_1 / 5 (2) Oct 28, 2014The idea of an EMT and its dynamic oscillations and ability to create new matter was first conceived of by Charles Cagle in the late 1990's based largely on evidence of a ball lightning event that was written up in Scientific American in 1886. see: 'Curious Phenomenon In Venezuela'; Cowgill, Warner; Scientific American, 55:389, December 18, 1886._Any competent professor of E.E. when presented with the dynamics of an E-flux loop will agree with the analysis that an E-loop will convert to an H-loop by the pi/2 radian rotation of the flux density vector around the axis of the Poynting Vector everywhere on the flux toroid and than an H-loop can change back to an E-loop via the same flux density rotation. Further they'll agree that the E-loop mode with be a magnetic dipole and the H-loop mode will be an electric dipole. Our sun displays this oscillation going from solar max to solar minimum and vice-versa. They've yet to understand that solar max is electric dipole mode.

[Excerpt of Cagle's first 2 replies]C. Cagle 6/22/99In article <7knih2$s9d$1...@phys-ma.sol.co.uk>, M Gallacher <gall...@hotmail.com> wrote:> okay here some comment for you mr cagle > > 1. if the earth is expanding, why is the pacific closing? _The Earth isn't presently expanding. The expansion is cyclic and tied one to one with the production of mass in the core each time the electromagnetotoroid of the Earth goes into the poloidal current mode. The Pacific isn't closing. If you wish to believe that the plate margins near trench systems are doing something more than gravitationally relaxing into them from the last expansion episode then be my guest.

> 2. why is there no ocean floor older than the Jurassic _A series of episodic expansions since the period normally identified as the Jurassic has opened up all the oceans. In other words since the period known as the Jurassic the Earth has expanded about 6.3 fold in volume from having a total surface area of about 57.5 million square miles to the present 196.5 million square miles. link to: http://people.enternet.com.au/~jmaxlow/images/global.jpg

> 3. why is the temperature of the earth dropping at a rate that fits > with what we know about major element radioactive decay curves. & > the best one _It seems that the best calorimetry in the world still is almost a black art so I imagine that it isn't impossible for the interpretation of data to converge toward expectations. History shows this sort of thing to be pattern in science. At the turn of the century we find all of the geologists sedimentary age data suddenly converging from billions of years towards Lord Kelvin's 100 million year age of the Earth that he had calculated using heat flow equations that he developed.

> why is it expanding? the best reply I have heard is we dont know but > we know it is - how sound is that compared with plate tectonics - > imperfect but observable _The Earth expands each time its electromagnetotoroid (the structure which generates the Earth's dipole field) goes from the toroidal current (ring current) mode to the poloidal current mode. The electromagnetotoroid (EMT) of the Sun phases through such mode changes about every 5.5 years. That is, it takes about 5.5 years to go from solar minimum (maximum magnetic dipole mode) to solar maximum (maximum electric dipole mode). The expansion take place because in the poloidal current mode the Earth's EMT achieves high current densities in the core. A recent discovery I made is that currents which have a fast rising current density can undergo a pi/2 radian current vector rotation which produces (out of a constricted region) a current loop system. On the macroscale such current loops can be very large and on the Sun large scale current loops systems are produced from the core and at the points such current loops pierce the photosphere are produced sunspots. But such current loop systems are scalable; that is to say they can also be produced at the microdomain level and at the proper scale are in direct identity with neutrons. So, when the Earth's EMT goes into the poloidal current mode it can produce hundreds of billions of tons of neutrons per second in the core. The EMT itself is a singularity structure and has a strong gravitational field which keeps the neutrons relatively localized. A gravitational field is a time gradient field. That may be an unfamiliar term to you but time passes at different rates in a gravitational field depending upon the altitude in the field and that differential is expressed as a gradient. Experiments with sychronized atomic clocks have show this effect. The Mossbauer Effect is a confirmation of this also. Charged particles which are overlapping in momentum space behave just oppositely to that which is predicted by Coulomb's law. This is also a bit of new physics which I had discovered. In other words charged particles do not actually obey Coulomb's law when they are in the same rest frame. This is very easy to prove classically using the simplest of arguments. _Here's my charged particle interaction "general case" which contains four simple parts: 1) "If like charged particles have a common de Broglie wavelength greater than or equal to the interparticle distance then they will attractively interact." 2) "If unlike charged particles have a common de Broglie wavelength greater than or equal to the interparticle distance then they will repulsively interact." 3) "If like charged particles have a common de Broglie wavelength less than the interparticle distance then they will repulsively interact." 4) "If unlike charged particles have a common de Broglie wavelength less than the interparticle distance then they will attractively interact." Parts three and four correspond to Coulomb's Law but they are subsumed under the 'general case'. _This 'general case' is part of the foundation for a new and Apocalyptic Physics. _What is meant by a 'common' de Broglie wavelength? _The de Broglie wavelength, lambda, of a particle is defined as: lambda=h/mv and then two interacting particles have de Broglie wavelengths which are specific only to that relationship. In a universe of n particles a single particle has n-1 de Broglie wavelengths. Since we're concentrating on a specific relationship then we can arbitrarily distribute the absolute velocity between the two particles into parts to arrive at the single unique solution of a 'common' de Broglie wavelength. This is just a simple way to define whether or not two particles have a common rest frame or occupy a common momentum space. _The common de Broglie wavelength is (c-lambda) or [Lamba sub c] arrived at by recognizing that for any two charged particles that m1*v1=m2*v2 so that the velocities are distributed inversely with respect to their masses so that V(sub a) = absolute speed between the two particles = v1+v2. The interparticle distance is Dp (D sub p). So, if c-lambda/DpÑ1 then like charged particles are attractively interactive and unlike charges are repulsively interactive. If c-lambda/Dp < 1 then like charged particles are repulsively interactive and unlike charged particles are attractively interactive. This 'general case' fits with all known physics and eliminates the unnecessary 'strong force' and 'weak interaction'. _Couple this new 'general case' together with a strong time gradient field and you have the perfect environment to catalyze nuclear fusion reactions. _Moving outward from the inner core the time gradient field lessens (otherwise there wouldn't be a gradient) and neutrons and protons (which are one of the products of neutron decay) differentiate into superheavy and heavy elements which can remain relatively stable under the effects of extreme time dilation. As more mass is produced in the core these nuclei are forced further outward in the field and begin to undergo fission. For any heavy element which fissions into n daughters there is an n-fold increase in atomic volume which radically drops the density and causes a radical rise in buoyancy. Such decays at the outer core causes the development of hot fast rising plumes which as they move upward in the time gradient field become even more radioactive producing more heat which causes greater expansion of the plume material and embues it with even greater buoyancy and upward momentum. _The data concerning the generation of neutrons by current vector rotations from plasma currents with a fast rising current density is a matter of public record. See 'Project Sherwood' (The U.S. Program in Controlled Fusion) by Amsa S. Bishop - Library of Congress Cat. No 58-12602 - you will be able to find at least a dozen references where large quantities of neutrons (in bursts) were generated by various pinch devices which were early attempts at harnessing fusion. They called them 'spurious' neutrons or 'false' neutrons because they did not have the energy signature of fusion neutrons. They did not pursue the source of these neutrons with any vigor. Had they done so they might have discovered neutron creation in the 1950's. _Also see: S. Shah, H. Razdan, C. Bhat, and Q. Ali, "Neutron Generation in Lightning Bolts," NATURE, 313, 773 (1985). _There is an 1886 article ³Curious Phenomenon in Venezuela², Cowgill, Warner; Scientific American, 55:389, December 18, 1886 which recounts an encounter between ball lightning and nine persons which had physiological effects, by modern analysis of the radiation damage, that could only be attributed to a strong neutron flux associated with the phenomenon. No one ever conceived that there was a straightforward naturally existing means for the generation of mass nor for the catalyzation of fusion reactions in the cores of planets. Admittedly, from mainstream physics' comprehension of the behavior of charged particles and from their lack of understanding of the nature of a gravitational field (and their lack of understanding of the nature of charge) there wouldn't be a way for this to occur. The problem is that mainstream physics has the data but they have lacked a comprehensive paradigm from which to interpret it. I'm not a geologist and merely developed a theory of planetary expansion which was highly intuitive at first but then rapidly became filled in with experimental data which substantiated the original intuitive ideas. _Earth expansionists have long been plagued by the lack of a mechanism even though the data seemed overwhelming. Each time they were challenged they either spread their hands and confessed ignorance about the mechanism or grabbed at any speculative straw. Expansionists, in general, have supposed Earth expansion to be continuous while the mechanism I have provided clearly shows that it is cyclic and accompanied by a great deal of geological catastrophism. _There is not an experiment on record (in the whole of scientific history) which demonstrates that like-charged particles (fundamental particles) actually repel one another when they are in the same rest frame. Because we live in a very thermal world, the development of same rest frame pairs of like-charged fundamental particles can be statistically accounted for but their attractively interactive behavior has been written off as quantum tunneling (which is merely a name which says nothing about forces or process). _Presently, none of you are forced to believe any of this. However, when the next electromagnetic dipole reversal or dipole excursion event occurs (when the Earth's EMT has been stimulated into undergoing a pi/2 radian current vector rotation) then I think you will.

C. Cagle 6/22/99 _In article <376F0B23...@hotkey.net.au>, David Ford <dave...@hotkey.net.au> wrote: > Dear Charles, > > As you have no hope of defending your assertions that radio Isotope > dating is false, or flawed in some way, due to your unsubstantiated > claims of heavy metal production within the Earth, and have no > evidence of 'time-dilation' to conveniently circumvent the geological > record, I conclude you are in contempt of reason. _Did I say that my claims of heavy metal production are unsubstantiated? Or perhaps you just believe that they are? What you lack is the requisite knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physics to comprehend the substantiation.

> You wrote the following to Stavros TASSOS last Sunday. Stavros has never heard > of you, but his introduction to you was an eye opener. _Tassos's physics is a joke. You presented his theories as URL's we should check out and so I did and merely make the point that his brand and your brand of bullshit psuedoscience which is evoked to substantiate Earth expansion does more to discredit it than if you just flat out attacked it. You think you are doing good and you merely dirty the water with nonsense. I could easily suppose that the subductionists hired you to obfuscate the issues associated with planetary expansion. :-).

I wish there was a way to copy the large gif they have at the start of the article. HA!

Go to Google, choose Maps, move to England and switch to Satellite View. You can see the Continental Shelf. That used to be above sea level. That's what the gif is showing. As the ice melted, sea levels rose drowning whole areas. The thing is, that happened worldwide.

Shift to Gulf of Thailand and see the large region that was flooded. Then the area between Australia and New Guinea. Then New Zealand, Then The Yellow Sea. Move around the world, and the light blue area was once land where people lived, where the resources were.

On a static Earth, the only solution for the sea level rise is that the ice was stored on the continents during "Ice Ages". GET does not mean that there were no "Ice Ages", but as the Earth grew, so did the water filling those oceans.

This represents the last event that happened world wide, that killed huge numbers of people. The diversity of people, shows the number of times that people were wiped out, leaving a few survivors to start again. The differences in skin color, height, etc... of the survivors fill that resurging pocket of life.

People have been around a long time, they thrive, grow in numbers, then are wiped out, forced to start again.

The sea level rise and the colossal amounts of meltwater discharged from the collapsing ice sheet meant that areas that previously were land eventually became seabed. Britain and Ireland, which had been joined to Europe throughout the last ice age, finally separated with the flooding of the English Channel around 10,000 years ago. Credit: Henry Patton/CAGE

Scientists have reconstructed in detail the collapse of the Eurasian ice sheet at the end of the last ice age. The big melt wreaked havoc across the European continent, driving home the original Brexit 10,000 years ago.

The Eurasian ice sheet was an enormous conveyor of ice that covered most of northern Europe some 23,000 years ago. Its extent was such that a skier could have traversed 4,500 km continuously across its expanse from the far southwestern isles in Britain to Franz Josef Land in the Siberian Arctic. Its existence had a massive and extremely hostile impact on Europe at the time.

This ice sheet alone lowered the global sea level by over 20 meters. As it melted and collapsed, it caused severe flooding across the continent, led to dramatic sea level rise, and diverted mega-rivers that raged on the continent. A new model investigating the retreat of this ice sheet and its many impacts has just been published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

Ten times the melt of Greenland and Antarctica today

"Our model experiments show that from 15000 to 13000 years ago, the Eurasian ice sheet lost 750 cubic kilometres of ice a year. For short periods, it peaked at ice loss rates of over 3000 cubic kilometres per year," says first author Henry Patton, researcher at CAGE Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. A cubic kilometre of ice contains 1,000,000,000 tonnes of water. Now multiply that by 3000.

"There is an event in this deglaciation story called Meltwater Pulse 1A. This was a period of very rapid sea level rise that lasted some 400 to 500 years when global temperatures were rising very quickly. During this period, we estimate that the Eurasian Ice Sheet contributed around 2.5 metres to global sea level rise," says Patton.

"To place it in context," says professor Alun Hubbard, the paper's second author and a leading glaciologist. "This is almost 10 times the current rates of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica today. What's fascinating is that not all Eurasian ice retreat was from surface melting alone. Its northern and western sectors across the Barents Sea, Norway and Britain terminated directly into the sea. They underwent rapid collapse through calving of vast armadas of icebergs and undercutting of the ice margin by warm ocean currents."

"This is a harbinger of what's starting to happen to the Greenland ice sheet," warns Hubbard.

Collapse of the European ice sheet caused chaosBased on the latest reconstruction of the famous ice age river system, Fleuve Manche, the scientists have calculated that its catchment area was similar to that of the Mississippi. Credit: H.Patton/CAGEAll rivers in Europe unite

The influence of the Eurasian ice sheet extended far beyond what was directly covered by ice. One of the most dramatic impacts was the formation of the enormous Fleuve Manche. This was a mega-river network that drained the present-day Vistula, Elbe, Rhine and Thames rivers, and the meltwater from the ice sheet itself, through the Seine Estuary and into the North Atlantic.

"Some speculate that at some points during the European deglaciation, this river system had a discharge twice that of the Amazon today. Based on our latest reconstruction of this system, we have calculated that its catchment area was similar to that of the Mississippi. It was certainly the largest river system to have ever drained the Eurasian continent," says Patton

The vast reach of this catchment meant that this mega-river had the capacity to contribute enormous volumes of cold freshwater directly into the North Atlantic, enough to have severely modified the Gulf Stream—a major climate influencer.

Also, the sea level rise and the colossal amounts of meltwater discharged from the collapsing ice sheet meant that areas that were previously above sea level eventually became seabed.

"Britain and Ireland, which had been joined to Europe throughout the last ice age, finally separated with the flooding of the English Channel around 10,000 years ago. It was the original Brexit, so to speak," says Alun Hubbard.

The ice retreats, the humans advance

The ice reconstruction in this study provides a fascinating image of a changing Europe during the time that prehistoric humans came to populate the continent. The environmental challenges they met must have been spectacular.

"One thing that we show pretty well in this study is that our simulation is relevant to a range of different research disciplines, not only glaciology. It can even be useful for archaeologists who look at human migration routes, and are interested to see how the European environment developed over the last 20,000 years." says Patton

This model reconstruction has already proven a vital constraint for understanding complex systems beyond the ice sheet realm. For example, data from this study has been used to examine the evolution of gas hydrate stability within the Eurasian Arctic over glacial timescales, exploring the development of massive mounds and methane blow-out craters that have been recently discovered on the Arctic seafloor.

I have studied the "Expanding Tectonics theory" and find it a very interesting and logical explanation of the earths evolution. According to the theory the earth has grown bigger during the last 200 million years, a fact that, among other things, is demonstrated by the observed expansion of the ocean floor, so called "ocean floor spreding".If this theory is true it would be interesting to know if there are any electrical phenomenons that could explane or motivate this expansion.

Growing Earth Theory is powered by electricity coming in from the Galactic/Solar circuit, and from the crust, and from the atmosphere.

The energy comes in, powers transmutation of the aether into hydrogen, and the hydrogen into higher elements. All of the atoms making up the Earth are modern, not created in some supernova far away. Transmutation is occurring constantly.

Read through the thread from the start and you will see the discussion. Some of the links have died over time, but there is enough to get you started.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A dazzling discovery in northwestern China of hundreds of fossilized pterosaur eggs is providing fresh understanding of these flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs including evidence that their babies were born flightless and needed parental care.

An artist’s illustration shows individuals from the fish-eating pterosaur species Hamipterus tianshanensis, including adults, juvenile and eggs in this handout illustration obtained by Reuters November 30, 2017. Fossils of hundreds of Hamipterus individuals and more than 200 eggs were discovered at a site in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China. Zhao Chuang/Handout via REUTERS

Scientists said on Thursday they unearthed 215 eggs of the fish-eating Hamipterus tianshanensis -- a species whose adults had a crest atop an elongated skull, pointy teeth and a wingspan of more than 11 feet (3.5 meters) -- including 16 eggs containing partial embryonic remains.

Fossils of hundreds of male and female adult Hamipterus individuals were found alongside juveniles and eggs at the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region site, making this Cretaceous Period species that lived 120 million years ago perhaps the best understood of all pterosaurs.

“We want to call this region ‘Pterosaur Eden,'” said paleontologist Shunxing Jiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Pterosaurs were Earth’s first flying vertebrates. Birds and bats appeared later.

Until now, no pterosaur eggs had been found with embryos preserved in three dimensions. Researchers think up to 300 eggs may be present, some buried under the exposed fossils.

An artist’s illustration shows individuals from the fish-eating pterosaur species Hamipterus tianshanensis, including adults, juvenile and eggs in this handout illustration obtained by Reuters November 30, 2017. Fossils of hundreds of Hamipterus individuals and more than 200 eggs were discovered at a site in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China. Zhao Chuang/Handout via REUTERS

The embryonic bones indicated the hind legs of a baby Hamipterus developed more rapidly than crucial wing elements like the humerus bone, said paleontologist Alexander Kellner of Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.

“Some birds can fly on the same day they break out from the egg, while some others will need a long period of parental care. Our conclusion is that a baby Hamipterus can walk but can’t fly,” Jiang said, an unexpected finding.

The researchers believe these pterosaurs lived in a bustling colony near a large freshwater lake. Kellner cited evidence that females gathered together to lay eggs in nesting colonies and returned over the years to the same nesting site.

They suspect the eggs and some juvenile and adult individuals were washed away from a nesting site in a storm and into the lake, where they were preserved and later fossilized.

The oblong eggs, up to about 3 inches (7.2 cm) long, were pliable with a thin, hard outer layer marked by cracking and crazing covering a thick membrane inner layer, resembling soft eggs of some modern snakes and lizards.

There had been a paucity of pterosaur eggs and embryos in the paleontological record because it is difficult for soft-shelled eggs to fossilize.

allynh wrote:Hi, rickard,Growing Earth Theory is powered by electricity coming in from the Galactic/Solar circuit, and from the crust, and from the atmosphere.The energy comes in, powers transmutation of the aether into hydrogen, and the hydrogen into higher elements. All of the atoms making up the Earth are modern, not created in some supernova far away. Transmutation is occurring constantly.Read through the thread from the start and you will see the discussion. Some of the links have died over time, but there is enough to get you started.The thread keeps growing, just like the Earth does. GET it. HA!

Hi,First it would be interesting to know why my post has been moved to "Mad Ideas", and why nobody inform about the move. The Expansion Tectonics is a scientific theory and should be treated as such.

The expansion take place from the inside, or from the centre, of the earth and new matter is created and distribuited along the mid ocean ridges in all the creat oceans on the globe.On wich scientific ground do you postulate the idea about "transmutation of the aether". Can you explain it further?